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I’m delighted to announce that I won the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Large Scale Composition for 4.48 Psychosis. The award ceremony took place at The Brewery Hotel in London, and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. The award was one of…

The response to 4.48 Psychosis has been incredible. Here are some excerpts from them: The Independent. ★★★★★ “Where this first-ever operatic setting by Royal Opera House Guildhall composer-in-residence Philip Venables succeeds is through simple honesty. With a score ranging guilelessly…

From GSMD Press release: Philip Venables to research and write major work for performance at the ROH Linbury Studio Theatre in 2016. The Guildhall School of Music & Drama in association with the Royal Opera House recently announced composer Philip as the first Doctoral…

New opera is too safe. Even Thomas Adès’ end-of-the-pier blowjob bored me. Ninety years earlier, I am sure that Strauss’ Salome shocked people more than Powder Her Face ever did – though admittedly the Adès’ probably has a greater sense of fun. But have you seen contemporary opera in Britain and been shocked, unnerved, outraged, or even just a little pissed off? Probably not; I haven’t. All the other contemporary arts have had anarchic movements and anti-establishment manifestos, from Futurism to Dadaism to the ‘Post Porn Modernist Manifesto’. But not opera. New opera still seems shackled to the corpse of the old; “dead, repetitive, predictable, pretty”, according to Robert Thicknesse in The Guardian. Most modern art rails against conservatism; is new opera its last bastion?